Networking to Play Growing Role in Medical Vertical

HIPAA doesn’t apply to software makers because programs such as HealthVault store copies of information that consumers have opted to archive online, explained Nate McLemore, director of business development for Microsoft’s health solutions group. “The only way data comes into or leaves HealthVault is at the behest of the consumer. HIPAA creates a bubble for data that move between professionals and those caring for the consumer.” So the developer collaborated with privacy rights groups, McLemore said, to make sure they approved of HealthVault’s security and privacy protections. “They think the HealthVault model is actually better than HIPAA at protecting consumer choice and control,” he said.

Kaiser Permanente is pleased with Microsoft’s privacy and security provisions, said Oldenburg, adding the health care giant has a “deep commitment” to keeping health care data safe.

Microsoft’s protections seem to be going over well with privacy rights advocates, too. Deborah Peel is a medical doctor who founded the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation, one of the groups comprising the Coalition for Patient Privacy. Peel told Healthcare IT News last October that Microsoft had agreed to adhere to privacy principles the coalition developed in 2007. “We think they’re setting a new amazingly high bar and frankly, we think what they’re doing is really the best practice that the entire industry needs to follow,” she told the journal.

One of the ways Microsoft is doing that is by using the Continuity of Care Document (CCD) interoperability standard for the electronic exchange of medical data. CCD is gaining support from the federal government and has been approved by leading health care groups as the protocol for transmitting sensitive data. Right now, CCD appears to be the preferred standard. And, to be sure, CCD was a big reason why Kaiser Permanente chose to trial its project with Microsoft rather than Google. “When we asked about it, [CCD] was on their backlog and road map,” Oldenburg said of Google. But look for Kaiser Permanente to partner with Google sometime soon, she added. “We actually are assuming that over time we will work with both — it’s not so much that this is an exclusion ... [but] Microsoft was specifically using [CCD].”

At least one analyst takes Microsoft’s choice of CCD with a grain of salt. There’s still a question nationally of creating a single, uniform data set, said Insight Research’s Rosenberg. “And though Microsoft would love to think they’re in a position to dictate that kind of thing, in fact I think it really has to come from the government. ... Security and blah, blah, blah, that’s a given. It’s really trying to create a uniform set of data that can be used all the way from the physician’s office up through these big insurance/HMO conglomerates — that there is a single way to identify and categorize pieces of data.”

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines